Fishing

The Philippines is surrounded by a vast aquatic resource base. In 1976 the government adopted a 200-nautical-mile
exclusive economic zone covering some 2.2 million square kilometers.
However, the country's traditional fishing grounds constituted a
relatively small 126,500-squarekilometer area. Fish and other seafood
provided more than half the protein consumed by the average Filipino
household. Total fish production in 1989 was 2.3 million tons. Of this,
46 percent was caught by some 574,000 municipal and subsistence
fishermen, who operated small boats in shallow water, customarily no
more than three kilometers offshore. These fishermen were among the
poorest of the poor, with incomes averaging only 25 percent of the
national average. Another 27 percent of the catch came from the
approximately 45,000 commercial fishermen. An equal proportion of the
total catch was provided by the fast-growing aquaculture industry. Prawn
production, mostly aquaculture, developed rapidly in the 1980s,
averaging 31,000 tons during the 1984-87 period. In 1988 exports of
fishery products amounted to US$407 million, approximately 6 percent of
total exports.

During much of the 1980s, the livelihood of small municipal and
subsistence fishermen was undermined by low production, stagnating at
approximately 1 million tons per year. A number of factors contributed
to the low production: encroachment of commercial fishermen into shallow
waters, destruction of the marine environment, over-fishing, and an
increasing number of fish ponds. A large proportion of the mangrove
forests was cleared to construct fishponds, seriously damaging the
coastal ecological system. Coral reefs sustained serious damage from
illegal fishing with dynamite and cyanide, and from the muro-ami
fishing technique by which young swimmers pound the coral with rocks
attached to ropes to drive the fish into nets. Coral also was damaged by
silting from erosion caused by deforestation, and inland freshwater
lakes were polluted from industrial and agricultural wastes.